Condo dwellers want Quality Meat Packers Ltd., which employs some 700 people, to remove itself from the premises where the abattoir has done business for eight decades and relocate in an industrial area.

Of the five human senses — vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch — smell adapts most quickly to its environment and says, nah, not letting that get up my nose any more.

So maybe griping condo dwellers in the Bathurst and King Streets area should stick a figurative finger in their offended nostrils and let nature take its course, rather than sticking their noses in the air and demanding that an abattoir which has been in the neighbourhood far longer than any of the nouveau arrivistes move lock, stock and stinky barrel elsewhere.

As the Star’s Eric Andrew-Gee reported Monday, local residents are up in arms — pits duly deodorized, presumably — over the reek from a nearby slaughterhouse that wafts up toward their balconies, a stench particularly repellent in the hot summer months. They want Quality Meat Packers Ltd., which employs some 700 people, to remove itself from the premises where the abattoir has done business for eight decades and relocate in an industrial area.

Condo creatures get up my nose.

They are the invaders. Because of their wholesale migration into the city, Toronto neighbourhoods have become mutilated as greedy developers continue their assault on the landscape, shoehorning ugly-as-spit towers into every nook and cranny of available space, building relentlessly upwards. Formerly charming districts have been obliterated and entire rows of long-established businesses dumped on the curb as landowners seize the opportunity to make millions. Others hang on to their boarded up assets until the time is even riper for profiteering.

This ghastly transformation is a lot more distressing than nostrils pinched by a fleeting noxious aroma.

I don’t have much sympathy for wrinkled snouts.

Those of us who’ve always lived downtown understand that our senses will be constantly bombarded — by smells, sirens, car fumes, the entire cacophony and olfactory spectrum. Inner city existence requires tolerance, an acceptance of annoyances and spillover within a crowded space. Where I live, the smell from the lake on stagnant days can be overwhelming. Tour buses on The Esplanade belch an eye-watering miasma. Diesel vapours under the crumbling Gardiner make my stomach heave. The benefits of a downtown address, however, are ample compensation for all that.

If it’s bucolic and non-aggravated you want, go to the country and take your ratepayers’ groups with you. Of course, there are plenty of disagreeable smells there too of the rural variety. The nose is not a no-go zone, anywhere.

In truth, the proboscis has a keen memory unless an individual suffers from anosmia — the temporary or permanent loss of smell. Human memory is vastly triggered by odours. Specific smells evoke a sense of place or an event or an emotion, whether pleasant or disturbing, summoning up experiences from the past.

But mostly the nose acclimatizes almost immediately, filtering out repetitive odorant stimuli by reducing the rate at which neurons in the nasal cavity are firing. As soon as the nose recognizes that a smell is not dangerous, it stops identifying that irritant. When a bad odour appears to go away, it’s really just passed the internal sniff-test and becomes sensor-absorbed.

Anyway, there’s nothing harmful about an abattoir’s bouquet of redolence. I grew up within a block of a slaughterhouse near Christie Pits. Often I accompanied my mother on early-morning trips to that place, where she’d bang on the back door to clandestinely purchase tripe from a blood-splattered butcher. Tripe is the rubbery, honeycombed lining of a cow’s stomach. In those days, you couldn’t buy tripe in any store. Now it appears on upscale restaurant menus and can be bought in jars from Pusateri’s.

Tripe always made me think of Jason and The Golden Fleece, enchanted as I was at that time by Greek mythology. But preparing tripe was a laborious process, soaking and blanching and scrubbing down to the furry nap for consistent thickness. Not nearly as much fun as, say, rinsing snails — escargot to you — in the basement sink for hours on end, my job to pluck the gastropods off the wall as they made a (slow) run for it. They had a dank, sea smell, not at all like slugs from the garden.

Peasant food, gone uptown precious now, and neo downtowners might grimace at the messiness and malodorous stench of it all, so severed have we become from the food preparation chain, farm to blood-slicked abattoir to The Keg.

Not for the faint of heart or nose.

Advice to King Street condo prisses: Just go blow.

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